Reinventing a Classic: 'A Village Romeo and Juliet' Reinventing a Classic: 'A Village Romeo and Juliet' Audio selections In 2013, the world will celebrate a great operatic anniversary: the 200th birthday of Giuseppe Verdi. But as it happens, there's another opera composer who reached a similar milestone just a bit earlier. The year 2012 marks the 150th birthday of Frederick Delius -- who wrote the opera featured here this week. Delius has been called the quintessential English composer. Yet both he and his music were actually quite cosmopolitan. Delius's parents both came from Germany, but they had taken British citizenship by the time the composer was born, in the town of Bradford, in 1862. His father was a successful wool merchant, and hoped his son would eventually take over the business. But the young Frederick soon displayed a decided wanderlust. He travelled in Sweden and France, spending time on the riviera. In Norway Delius met Edvard Grieg, who remained a close friend, and that country's mountains and fjords became a sort of spiritual home for the composer.

In his early twenties, he found an actual home in another, very different locale, even farther from the moors of his native Yorkshire. For a time, during the 1880s, Delius ran an orange plantation in Solana Grove, Florida -- an experience that inspired the Florida Suite, one of his many, evocative orchestral scores. Delius also wrote six operas. And, given his travels, it's not surprising that they display a wide range of subject matter. One, called Koanga, was inspired by an African-American slave song. Another, The Magic Fountain, represents the Native American culture of Florida. A Village Romeo and Juliet, his best-known opera, is based on a German short story. Its world premiere, which was sung in German, took place in Berlin, in 1907. The original English version, featured in this production from Wexford, was performed at the opera's London premiere, at Covent Garden, in 1910. Many of Delius's works explore a theme that fascinated the composer throughout his career: the transience of human experience and the brevity of life itself.

It's heard in his famous song cycle "Songs of Sunset," which he originally called "Songs of Twilight and Sadness." Yet the composer's exploration of those ideas never found more vivid, or poignant expression than in his unique, operatic take on the traditional story of Romeo and Juliet -- in which two troubled young lovers decide that a single day of happiness is enough to last an entire, all too brief lifetime. On World of Opera, host Lisa Simeone presents A Village Romeo and Juliet from the Wexford Opera Festival, on the southeast coast of Ireland -- an event known for its exceptional productions of unusual and neglected operas. The stars are tenor John Belleford and soprano Jessica Muirhead as the lovers Sali and Vreli, with conductor Rory MacDonald. Social sharing Frederick Delius | Biography & History | AllMusic google+ Artist Biography by Alexander Carpenter Frederick Delius was an English composer who forged a unique version of the Impressionist musical language of the early twentieth century. He was born in Bradford, England, in 1862, and died in Grez-sur-Loing, France, in 1934.

He did not come from a musical family; rather, his father owned a wool company and hoped that his son would follow a career in business. Delius , however, wanted to study music, and though his father did not approve of music as a profession, he did not discourage music-making as a pastime; thus, Delius was allowed to study the violin and the piano. To his father's dismay, he also spent much of his youth sneaking away from school to attend concerts and opera performances. When he completed school, he went to work for his father in the family business. In 1884, he left England for Florida, where he worked on a plantation as an orange grower. While in Florida, he began studying music with Thomas Ward, a musician and teacher from Jacksonville. Delius proved to be a failure as an orange grower, and began supporting himself as a musician. In 1886, his father arranged for him to spend a year and a half studying music in Germany at the Leipzig Conservatory. Though Delius would later insist that he learned very little of importance during his stay in Leipzig, it was there that he met Grieg , with whom he forged a lifelong friendship.

Grieg convinced Delius ' father to allow the young man to become a composer, and Delius , with the support of his formerly reluctant father, soon moved to Paris and began living the life of an artist. Once in Paris, Delius began composing in earnest, and towards the end of the nineteenth century had already completed two operas, Irmelin and The Magic Fountain. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Delius married the painter Jelka Rosen and produced a number of important works, including the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, the large-scale choral works Appalachia and A Mass of Life (based on the writings of Nietzsche), a piano concerto, and a number of songs and chamber pieces. His music was well-received throughout Europe, and Delius was quite successful up until World War I, when he was forced to leave France for England. Despite his renown in continental Europe, Delius was virtually unknown in his native England, and his stay there was marred by financial difficulties. After the war, Delius returned to France, where the syphilis he had contracted in Florida gradually caused him to become paralyzed and blind. Ironically, as Delius became increasingly infirm, his fame began to spread.

This was due in large part to the efforts of English composer Sir Thomas Beecham , who championed Delius ' music and organized a Delius Festival in 1929. Though terribly ill, Delius nonetheless still wanted to compose, and in 1928 enlisted the services of English musician Eric Fenby , to whom he dictated music (Fenby would later write a book about Delius). Towards the end of his life, Delius was made Companion of Honor by King George V of England, and was awarded an honorary degree in music by Oxford University. Before his death, Delius was able to hear his music over the radio and on record, but these accomplishments paled before the terrible deterioration of his health, and he died in seclusion. Opera�s Poet of Nostalgia Opera’s Poet of Nostalgia Jack Sullivan explores the operatic life of Frederick Delius During a rare moment of tranquillity in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur, the falsely accused man on the run listens enraptured as a pianist plays Delius’s ‘Summer Night on the River’. The pianist is blind, but he insists he can see ‘intangible things’, including the hero’s innocence.

The moment doesn’t change anything—after all, ‘intangible things’ can’t be used as evidence in a court of law—but the hero gains an inner sense of hope and renewal. Delius is exactly the right composer for this scene, not only because his languid arpeggios provide the requisite serenity (and because he himself went blind), but because the ‘intangible’ moment that lights up a dark world is what his art is about. According to Cecil Grey, Delius’s own summer night on the river occurred ‘when he was sitting out on the veranda of his house on his orange grove in Florida, and the sound came to him from the distance of the voices of negroes in the plantation, singing in chorus. It is the rapture of that moment that Delius is perpetually seeking to communicate in all his characteristic work.’ The libretto of A Village Romeo and Juliet calls these perpetual communications ‘distant music, magic voices’ that ‘softly echo from afar’. Delius never stopped searching for them: ‘How sweet the silent backward tracings’, a line from Whitman in one of his final songs, could be the title of almost anything he wrote.

For Delius, as with Proust, the attempt to recapture a great moment is as important as the revelation itself, and far more compelling than the present. In Fennimore and Gerda, the heroine laments that ‘reality is grey and pitiless’ as she gazes at the water (an essential element for Delian contemplation) and remembers more hopeful times. Only remembrances of things past, she says, are ‘golden’. Only the lost moment is ‘forever’. So it is in all the operas: in a Louisiana bayou the enslaved African Prince Koanga re-imagines his lost homeland; the lovers in A Village Romeo and Juliet ‘once more relive all those days upon the wildland’; the hero of The Magic Fountain goes on a ‘phantom quest’ in the Everglades for his lost childhood. Memory is so potent, it becomes a character. As the heroine of Margot La Rouge puts it, ‘The past rises and beckons’. For the rest of this article, buy the October issue, or subscribe now !

Shakespeare and Opera | Shakespeare, William | Britannica.com Shakespeare and Opera EU Considers Rules For Robots If William Shakespeare’s ascendancy over Western theatre has not extended to the opera stage—a fact explained by the want of Shakespeare-congenial librettists, the literary indifference of composers, and the difficulties involved in setting iambic pentameters to music—the Shakespeare canon has nonetheless established itself as one of the great inspirers of operas. This is clear from the 200-odd operas based on Shakespeare’s plays, about half a dozen of which are among the rare monuments of operatic achievement. It is further demonstrated by an even more extended series of furtive references—moments of other operas that show signs of unmistakable Shakespearean family resemblance without any declared genealogical link to their source. Shakespeare’s plays have thus given rise, side by side, to a “legitimate” operatic offspring and to an anonymous operatic dissemination, a recorded and an unrecorded history of Shakespeare on the opera stage.

The Singer Foure as “Hamlet,” oil on canvas by … Giraudon/Art Resource, New York Opera derived from Shakespeare The necessity of accommodating the formal unruliness and many-faceted characters of Shakespeare’s theatre to the succession of recitative and aria, elaborate scenery, and other conventions of opera makes adaptation of Shakespeare a hazardous business. Actor-manager David Garrick ’s opera version of The Tempest (1756) was accused of “castrating” Shakespeare’s original play, while Lord Byron (in an 1818 letter to the poet Samuel Rogers) berated Gioacchino Rossini ’s librettist for “crucifying” Othello (1816). Henry Purcell ’s The Fairy Queen (1692) is usually dubbed the first Shakespearean opera. Its music, however, is confined to interludes within a curtailed A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Only in Dido and Aeneas (1689) did Purcell have the chance to write music for a tragic heroine of mythical status.

Purcell’s only real opera, written for a cast of young girls, displays distinctly Shakespearean influences that can be safely ascribed to his librettist, the poet and playwright Nahum Tate , who was familiar with the canon. Tate consistently “improved” Shakespeare to suit new audience tastes, the most famous instance being the happy ending he appended to King Lear (Tate’s King Lear of 1681—in which Cordelia not only lives but marries Edgar—was in fact the only version to be presented on the English stage for the next 150 years). For Dido and Aeneas, Tate actually followed Virgil quite faithfully, with the exception of the addition of two Macbeth-inspired witch scenes that both complicate the action and introduce a considerable measure of doubt about the role of destiny in Aeneas’s decisions; Mercury here becomes a mere decoy sent by the witches to trick Aeneas with the overall purpose of hurting Dido. Yet this addition established a Shakespearean dimension that made this short opera appropriate for use as a “play within a play” in performances of Measure for Measure on the London stage in 1700.

Indeed, such insertions of musical pieces in or after Shakespeare’s plays were customary in the 18th century: George Frideric Handel ’s pastoral Acis and Galatea, for example, was performed at Drury Lane in 1724 as an afterpiece for The Tempest. Opera seria and opera buffa Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies It is tantalizing, with regard to Shakespearean dramaturgy, to note that opera was born in Florence in 1600—about the time that Hamlet first voiced Shakespeare’s views on acting. Shakespeare and the theorists of opera expressed similar concerns about language and performance. (See also Sidebar: Shakespeare on Theatre .) Opera prospered, and Venice started opening public opera houses in 1637; in 1642 Puritan London closed its theatres. Italian opera reached London only at the beginning of the 18th century, when it immediately became a fashion and divided the public.

Shakespeare was called upon in this contest: the “rude mechanicals’ ” play from A Midsummer Night’s Dream was turned into a caricature of Italian opera in Richard Leveridge’s A Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe (1716). Some 30 years later (1745), J.F. Lampe revived the book as a “mock opera,” complete with rage aria and contrived happy ending. British Culture and Politics More antagonistic still were the reactions to Italian opera written on Shakespearean librettos. Francesco Gasparini’s Ambleto (Hamlet), having been played throughout Europe, was taken to London in 1712 by the celebrated castrato Nicolini but quickly disappeared from the scene. Francesco Maria Veracini’s Rosalinda (1744)—As You Like It staged as a polite Italian pastoral and written for a cast of female and castrato sopranos—suffered the same fate. Gli equivoci, an opera buffa by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s only English disciple, Stephen Storace , presents a different case.

Written on a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte (much in the spirit of his—and Mozart’s—The Marriage of Figaro) and auspiciously received in 1786 at the Vienna Burgtheater (now the Hofburgtheater) and throughout Germany, Gli equivoci, which is the only known setting of The Comedy of Errors, was considered too “Mozartian” and never made its way to London. Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Others, such as J.C. Smith and the aforementioned David Garrick , both used and challenged the Italian opera fashion. While their opera on The Tempest, as well as The Fairies (1755), where the Prologue jokingly attributes authorship to a “Signor Shakespearelli,” were poorly received, Garrick’s Tempest book was successfully revived in 1777 with music by the remarkable Thomas Linley (1756–78). Throughout the 18th century, The Tempest, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was never actually performed except as a musical entertainment.

After the turn of the century, composers of opera buffa (such as Antonio Salieri ) and German singspiel (such as Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf ) turned their eyes to Shakespeare’s more farcical vein. In 1849 Otto Nicolai , having declared that only Mozart could do justice to Shakespeare, wrote a successful opera on Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor). Hermann Goetz’s Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung (1874; The Taming of the Shrew) made Kate fall in love with Petruchio almost at first sight—mutating Shakespeare’s self-confident antiheroine into a hochdramatisch 19th-century hysteric. Women from theatre to opera The twilight of opera seria and the advent of Romantic opera are epitomized by the emergence of the prima donna and the female conquest of the formerly castrato-dominated soprano region. Shakespeare’s female roles, because they were played by boys, were usually less developed than his male roles; with the notable exceptions of Rosalind (in As You Like It) and Cleopatra (in Antony and Cleopatra), Shakespeare’s female roles were far less significant.

But the 19th-century primacy of the soprano extends to many other Shakespearean female roles, turning them into major parts. Rossini’s Otello (1816), the first opera seria with a tragic ending, poises three tenors—Iago (the villain), Rodrigo (the rejected lover), and Otello (the interloper)—against a besieged Desdemona who outweighs them all—and her basso father, Brabantio, to boot. Following the 18th-century French “translation” of Othello by Jean-François Ducis , Rossini replaces the handkerchief, that shockingly intimate piece of female lingerie, with the more acceptable misdelivered, unaddressed letter of Italian comedy. The French poets Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny made endless fun of this “improvement,” yet the painter Eugène Delacroix was so impressed by this reading that his paintings show Desdemona, not Othello, as the protagonist. Most of the action in the first acts is indeed forced into the mold of conventional opera seria.

It contains bravura arias for all the soloists and dramatic grand finales that only distantly relate to the subtle progression of the Shakespearean narrative. Contrary to the stage version, which travels from Venice to Cyprus and involves lowlife characters such as prostitutes and gulls, the whole opera is set in magnificent palaces in Venice, staging mostly polite exchanges between members of a single noble class of individuals governed by acceptable passions. Yet in the final act of this seminal opera, Rossini introduced a quotation from Dante’s Inferno, sung by a passing gondolier, which prompts Desdemona to sing an elaborate Willow Song that she accompanies on her harp, followed by a very moving prayer, leading on to the murder scene and a terse conclusion. Otello is the only Rossini opera to end in this manner, and the influence of this last act on 19th-century opera has proved enduring and far-reaching. Trending Topics Lady Flora Hastings The passionate “Shakespearien” Hector Berlioz put the sopranos in the forefront in his last work, Béatrice et Bénédict (1862), based on the “merry war” subplot of Much Ado About Nothing.

Shakespeare was a never-ending inspiration to Berlioz, notably in his Roméo et Juliette choral symphony (composed 1839). Romeo and Juliet has proved to be an all-time favourite for opera composers, prompting more than 20 versions. In adaptations by such composers as Nicola Antonio Zingarelli and Nicola Vaccai, the part of Romeo is sung by a mezzo-soprano , to the disapproval of Berlioz, who preferred, for this and other reasons, Daniel Steibelt’s Roméo et Juliette (1793). I Capuleti, a vehicle for the famous Grisi sisters (Giuditta and Giulia), privileged female ensembles and conquered the public in the lovers’ final duet by means of a timely awakening of Giulietta—an ending popularized by Garrick. Juliette is a sophisticated coloratura in Charles Gounod ’s 1867 opera (termed by Rossini “a duet in three parts: one before, one during, and one after”), overdeveloped, like the Ophelia of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet (1868), at the expense of male partners.

Other examples of that tendency include Saverio Mercadante ’s Amleto (1822), where the part of Hamlet is sung by a woman, and a verismo opera renamed Giulietta e Romeo (1922) by Riccardo Zandonai. The wedding procession from the Paris premiere of the 1888 version of Charles Gounod’s opera … Mary Evans Picture Library Both Gounod’s and Thomas’s librettos were written by the successful team of Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, who together and separately or with others authored the librettos of some of the most enduring French operas. The plot of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is fairly faithful to the original, doing away with many secondary characters and expanding others (the page Stefano, for example, who is unnamed in Shakespeare’s tragedy, has a memorable aria). The major departure from the original plot is once again the reawakening of Juliette just in time for a pathetic duet with Romeo before both die, begging God’s forgiveness for their unchristian suicide.

The opera, which begins with the ball scene at the Capulets’, overdramatizes several episodes, including the first appearance of Juliet, the revelation (by Tybalt rather than her nurse) of Romeo’s identity to Juliet, and Juliet’s fake death, which occurs just as her father has taken her arm to lead her to the chapel to marry Paris. In short, it possessed all the ingredients for success and was an immediate hit. It has remained in repertoire along with Faust, Gounod’s other adaptation from a literary masterpiece. In the early 1990s Thomas’s Hamlet, after a long period of neglect, began once again to be performed by celebrated singers on prestigious stages and to be recorded. The opera poises Hamlet mostly against Gertrude, his mother, and his beloved Ophelia, but it also offers interesting insights into the political questions that troubled France at the time it was written, two years before the end of the Second Empire: Gertrude knows all about the murder of her former husband by Claudius (her current husband), and Hamlet rejects Ophelia only when he realizes that Polonius was an accomplice in the deed.

In the “mousetrap” scene the seemingly mad Hamlet pulls the crown off Claudius’s head, prompting a finale of epic proportion, as the Court comments on this act of lèse-majesté. In the final scene, at the graveyard, the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears for a third time, visible to all this time, demanding action from Hamlet, who immediately kills King Claudius, thus restoring legitimacy to the throne and bringing stability to his tormented country. The opera ends to the sound of the people shouting “Vive Hamlet! Vive notre roi!” In Das Liebesverbot (1836), Richard Wagner ’s only Shakespeare opera and the only extant setting of Measure for Measure, the Duke’s role is entirely devolved to Isabella, who secretly loves the freethinker Lucio. The original performances were a complete failure, and the piece all but disappeared from the repertoire. Some performances in the mid-to-late 20th century, as well as recordings, however, have saved the work from utter oblivion and shed light on Wagner’s formative years, when he was still attempting to write mainstream music.

As for the prominent role of the soprano in Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth (1847), it is due to Shakespeare himself: Verdi simply recognized that Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies read exactly like opera solos. His instruction that she “should not sing at all” is echoed in Ernest Bloch ’s Macbeth (1910), where the orchestra plays the leading part, providing counterpoint, depth, and tragic irony that voices alone cannot convey. Like Thomas’s Hamlet, Verdi’s Macbeth reflects the political situation in the composer’s homeland in more ways than one: the tyrannical authority of the usurpers is opposed by Scottish exiles clamouring for liberty. The chorus of the Profughi Scozzesi is an echo of “ Va, pensiero, ” the famous chorus from Nabucco that became an anthem in the struggle for Italian unity—prompting Verdi’s name to become an acronym for the motto “Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’Italia.” Rossini’s Otello was saved by the memory of Shakespeare’s, as Stendhal put it.

Twentieth-century adaptations swung in the opposite direction: in Mario Zafred’s Amleto (1961) or Frank Martin ’s Der Sturm (1956), the parlando music encumbers Shakespeare’s words; literal readings by Reynaldo Hahn (1935) and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1961) have resulted in two disproportionately lengthy versions of The Merchant of Venice. Opera inspired by Shakespeare The slower pace of operatic plots—the result of the singing of the dialogue and the interruption of the action by arias—imposes simplification. Composers therefore have been faced with the task of filling the gaps in most Shakespeare-based librettos. Their problem is that, as W.H. Auden pointed out, contrary to plays, operas cannot easily present characters who are “potentially good and bad.” However, opera has other advantages: music speaks directly to the emotions, and its means are expanded by ensemble singing and the support of the orchestra.

The simultaneous expression of different ideas and feelings thus made possible was first fully applied to Shakespearean opera in Verdi’s Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893), composed when the operatic form had reached its full maturity, just before the musical revolutions of Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. The first and definitive attempt to challenge Rossini’s work, Otello is the only Shakespeare opera that generates the same critical response as the original, including G.B. Shaw’s quip that “instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.” Verdi’s librettist, Arrigo Boito , a composer in his own right, took the opposite stance to Rossini’s librettist and set the whole opera in Cyprus. He dropped altogether the confrontation between the lovers and Desdemona’s father in the Doges’ Palace, which had occupied so much of the earlier opera. Instead, he transposed Othello’s tale of the wooing of Desdemona to an extended love duet, one of the most beautiful in the operatic canon.

Jago (Iago), all trills and chromaticism, is epitomized by his “ Credo ”—a piece in line with the 19th century’s fascination with Mephistophelian characters (Boito himself wrote an opera called Mefistofele)—which concludes with the nihilistic line “la morte è il nulla” (“death is nothingness”). It takes its cue from some of Iago’s quizzical statements and “motiveless malignity” but definitely steps outside Elizabethan conceptions and presents a distinctly 19th-century air. The degradation of Otello’s heroic stature, which was established in his terse entrance aria (“ Esultate ”), is depicted by his gradual appropriation of Jago’s style and his distortion of Desdemona’s lyrical phrases. In the tradition of Italian opera, Otello includes a “state scene” with a grand finale, in which stunned onlookers comment on the passions opposing the protagonists, but, like Rossini’s final act, Verdi’s reaches heights of simplicity and emotion unlike any opera that had gone before. Desdemona’s Willow Song, followed by a Prayer, becomes a poignant lull before the stormy denouement.

Otello, who has often been compared to Wagner’s Tristan, dies on the interrupted word bacio (“kiss”), in a rapturous recall of the theme developed in the earlier love duet. Opening scene of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Otello, from … Mary Evans Picture Library ” (“A kiss”) section of the love duet … Film clip courtesy of MGM Consumer Products The plot of Verdi’s Falstaff tightens The Merry Wives of Windsor while integrating elements from the Henry IV plays—such as Falstaff’s well-known speech on honour—which give more depth to the main character. Verdi was thus able to develop in parallel the comedy involving Falstaff and his acolytes on one side and Mistress Quickly and her friends on the other, as well as the darker undertones of the scenes involving the jealous Ford, and the lyrical development of the love-interest of Fenton and Nannetta. The final fugue, “ Tutto nel mondo è burla, ” is loosely based on the “Seven Ages of Man” speech from As You Like It (“all the world’s a stage” becomes “all the world’s a joke”).

It celebrates against all evidence the victory of the “fat knight,” who both invokes and provokes the liberating force of laughter. Like Otello, Falstaff moves imperceptibly from aria to duet or ensemble, unhampered by recitative, as if Shakespearean inspiration had helped the old master to free himself from the conventions on which he had thrived. Giuseppe Verdi taking a bow after the first performance of Falstaff; … Mary Evans Picture Library Credited with being the only successful setting of Shakespeare’s words, Benjamin Britten ’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960) shares a nostalgia for Elizabethan England with two earlier, Falstaff-inspired works: Ralph Vaughan Williams ’s Sir John in Love (1929) and Gustav Holst ’s At the Boar’s Head (1925). Both of these integrate “old English melodies,” while Frederick Delius ’s A Village Romeo and Juliet (1900–01) transposes the mythical “star-crossed lovers” into a supposedly more realistic context.

Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the work of a mature opera composer who was able to devise the libretto himself, with the help of Peter Pears (who sang the part of Lysander), trimming the play without altering the text and making bold choices in the musical treatment of the characters. Opening in the woods with the fairies, in a musical atmosphere akin to that of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, Britten takes his audience without mediation into the world of the supernatural, where misrule and desire are given free rein. Britten’s fascination with the alternation and occasional interaction between three groups of very different characters provides the key to the opera: the fairies seem to embody nostalgia, sung as they are by boys accompanied by harps and percussion, while the role of Oberon is devolved to a countertenor, Titania to a coloratura—perhaps a subtle reference to Mozart’s Queen of the Night (in Die Zauberflöte [The Magic Flute]).

It is interesting to note that the part of Oberon was written for Alfred Deller, the performer who played an essential part in the rediscovery of the countertenor tessitura and the popularization of the Elizabethan repertoire. Puck, the mediator between the three worlds of court, country, and supernatural and between the stage world and the audience, is a spoken role usually devolved to a teenager. The roles of the lovers, on the other hand, are characterized by an absence of arias or set pieces, making them hard to tell apart, following Shakespeare’s deliberately confusing design but also in the spirit of the first acts of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Finally, the Mechanicals, whom Britten called the Rustics, provide the composer with a delightful opportunity for parody, underlined by the use of brass and bassoon. The opera ends with marriage and reconciliation at the court of Theseus and Hippolyta, but the musical climax is the love scene between Titania and Bottom, at the very heart of the piece. The gradual blending of two radically opposed musical styles into the most exquisitely lyrical language can be deciphered as a musical interpretation of Victor Hugo’s Shakespeare-inspired theory that the sublime is often born of the grotesque.

Eminent recent European adaptations include Aribert Reimann’s Lear (1978), based on an extraordinarily austere rendering of Shakespeare’s hitherto unadapted play, and Luciano Berio ’s Un re in ascolto (1984; A King Listens), a reflection on creation and the complex workings of memory that is based on The Tempest. The French composer Pascal Dusapin’s Roméo et Juliette (1988) is a metatheatrical opera built around a rehearsal of Shakespeare’s play. Wintermärchen (1999) by the Belgian composer Philippe Boesmans (born 1936) is an adaptation in German of The Winter’s Tale, a kaleidoscopic work that develops the game of contrasts provided by the Shakespearean plot. One great originality of the new version of The Tempest by Thomas Adès (born 1971), first performed at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 2004, resides in its libretto by Meredith Oakes, a completely rewritten text following the original plot but allowing an English-speaking composer to benefit from the same distance as Continental musicians working with translations.

Adès adopts an eminently lyrical and introspective approach, with a gentle Caliban who seems to be Prospero’s doppelgänger. The opera, which in 2005 won an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera, is notable for the instrumental treatment of the part of Ariel, whose coloratura vocalizing contributes to create the supernatural atmosphere that underscores the whole piece. More than 200 operas based on Shakespeare’s plays have been written since 1945, but very few of them have remained in repertory. Coming a few years after Cole Porter ’s Kiss Me, Kate (1948; a lighthearted version of The Taming of the Shrew), Leonard Bernstein ’s West Side Story (1957) was a landmark at the frontier between musical and opera that transposed the story of Romeo and Juliet to a mid-20th-century New York torn apart by rival gangs, but it circumvented many key elements of the Shakespearean original, most notably Juliet’s suicide.

A tip of the hat to Shakespeare It is doubtful that Claudio Monteverdi knew the work of Shakespeare, yet his last opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea (1643), is arguably closer to Antony and Cleopatra than are the settings of that work by Gian Francesco Malipiero (1938) or Samuel Barber (1966). The constant formal invention displayed by Monteverdi mirrors Shakespeare’s fast succession of contrasting scenes: both pieces combine comic, tragic, ironic, and sentimental elements; both portray ambition and lust, shedding poetic light on the unbridled passions of a Roman leader, the repudiation of a virtuous empress (named Octavia in both pieces), and her replacement by a scheming courtesan; both include comic nurses—usually sung by male performers—belonging to the same tradition as the character in Romeo and Juliet. It has long been recognized that Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Shakespeare’s The Tempest share many features: initiation, the supernatural, the power of music, the wise magician and his uncouth servant.

Mozart, it seems, planned to write the music to a singspiel based on August Wilhelm von Schlegel ’s translation of The Tempest. The proposed book was actually set four times and, like most other German Tempest operas, resembles a sequel of Die Zauberflöte. It is also worth noting that Mozart’s Così fan tutte was reworked into a French version (1863) of Love’s Labour’s Lost by Léo Delibes , although one might contend that it is closer to other Shakespearean comedies involving cross-dressing or a love-quartet, such as Twelfth Night or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Berlioz conceived Les Troyens (1863), he said, according to the “Shakespearean system.” The only words by Shakespeare in the opera are in Didon and Enée’s love duet, which uses the “On such a night” dialogue of Lorenzo and Jessica in Act V, scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice, but other traceable borrowings are the ghosts that persuade the hero to leave Carthage and the comic scene that precedes Enée’s tempestuous confrontation with Didon.

The latter scene provides the only moment of comic relief in this highly dramatic work. All in all, the opera’s epic force derives as much from Shakespeare’s histories as from the Aeneid. Modest Mussorgsky ’s Boris Godunov (first performed 1874) is a literal setting of a play by Aleksandr Pushkin , itself modeled on Shakespeare’s histories, to which the composer added the Macbeth-inspired hallucination scene. The opera navigates in Shakespearean style between epic and drama, between the tragedy of the Russian people and the guilt-harrowed Tsar Boris, between popular comedy and the fate of the realm. The character of the Innocent can be seen as a direct echo of the Fool and Poor Tom in King Lear, while the murdered tsarevitch and his living counterpart point to characters and situations in Richard III. One might think that Mussorgsky’s masterpiece is an unlikely beneficiary of Shakespearean inspiration. The point, however, is that, unlike most adapters who have been wary of being defeated by their model, Pushkin was not afraid of Shakespeare. And Mussorgsky was not afraid of Pushkin, whose lines are set mostly as they were written.

Librettists have tended for various reasons to avoid direct contact with Shakespeare’s text and have turned not to Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet but back to Shakespeare’s sources, using Saxo Grammaticus ’s Gesta Danorum or Matteo Bandello ’s novella of the lovers of Verona. However, it seems to be of little doubt that, even in these two cases, not the venerable older authors but Shakespeare’s masterpieces provided the original inspiration. Chantal Schütz Frederick Delius - ABT Frederick Delius Romeo and Juliet Frederick Delius, whose real name was Theodore Albert, was born in Bradford, York, England in 1862. The son of a German wool merchant who did not regard music as a suitable profession, Delius entered the family business at which he was a failure so, in 1884, he went to Florida where he grew oranges and managed a plantation at Solano Grove near Jacksonville. He studied music with Thomas Ward and, in 1886, entered the Leipzig Conservatory where he was befriended by Edvard Grieg.

On leaving the conservatory, he settled in Paris where he was a part of the group that included Gauguin, Strindberg and Munch. His earliest compositions were songs, chamber works and orchestral pieces such as the Florida suite (l887, rev. 1889), but after 1890 he concentrated on operas, Imerlin (1890-92); The Magic Fountain (1893-95); Koanga (1895-97); and A Village Romeo and Juliet (1900-01). Only the last two were produced in his lifetime, Koanga at Eberfeld in 1904, and A Village Romeo and Juliet in Berlin in 1907. In 1897 Delius settled at Grez-sur-Loing, France with the artist Jelka Rosen, whom he married in 1903. Apart from a London concert inn 1899, his music was almost unknown in England until 1907 when his Piano Concerto (1897, rev.

1906), and the set of variations for chorus and orchestra Appalachia (1896-1903), were performed. Appalachia was heard by Sir Thomas Beecham, who became Delius' most ardent champion, poetic interpreter and loyal friend. Delius’ largest work outside the opera house was his Nietzsche setting A Mass of Life (1904-05) for soloists, choir and orchestra. But his best known works are the English Rhapsody, Briggs Fair (1907), In a Summer Garden (1908), North Country Sketches (1913-14), Song of the High Hills (1911) for wordless chorus and orchestra, and the two short tone poems On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912). In all of these Delius has a late Romantic style -- dominant discords, secondary sevenths, and chromatic harmonies.

He also wrote a Requiem (1914-16), a Violin Concerto (1916), a Cello Concerto (1921), a Concerto for Violin and Cello (1915-16), and the opera Fennimore and Gerda (1909-10, performed in Frankfurt in 1919). Due to illness, the incidental music for Flecker’s Hassan (1920-23) was the last music written by his own hand. In 1928, Eric Fenby became his musical secretary and enabled Delius to complete A Song of Summer (1929-30) for orchestra, the Third Violin Sonata (1930) and Songs of Farewell (1930) for chorus and orchestra. Blind and paralyzed, Delius visited England for the last time in 1929 for Beecham’s festival of his, Delius’ music. He died at Grez-sur-Loing, France in 1934, but is buried at Limpsfield, Surrey, England. Source: The New College Encyclopedia of Music by J. A.

Westrup and F. L. Harrison, revised by Conrad Wilson; W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1981 Frederick Delius: La Calinda - Classic FM Classic FM Schedule Frederick Delius: La Calinda Another of Delius’s best-known works falls into the same category as The Walk to the Paradise Garden, being an interlude from an opera that is now rarely heard in full. Koanga predates A Village Romeo and Juliet by just four years and comes from the composer’s Bohemian years in Paris during the 1890s. Delius himself considered it his best opera to date. It was his third after Irmelin and The Magic Fountain and it drew on his experiences in the orange groves of Florida. The hero of the opera, Koanga, is an African prince and voodoo priest, now working as a slave on a Mississippi plantation. Delius incorporated a traditional Martinique dance from the seventeenth century into the plot, for which he wrote a small musical interlude, borrowing from something he had written earlier in his first orchestral work, the Florida Suite.

When his trusty companion and scribe Eric Fenby arranged the interlude for orchestra in 1938 – some forty years later – it quickly became another hardy perennial on concert programmes up and down the land. Recommended Recording Frederick Delius | ArkivMusic Frederick Delius Biography Born: 1862 Died: 1934 Country: England Period: 20th Century Frederick Delius was an English composer who forged a unique version of the Impressionist musical language of the early twentieth century. He was born in Bradford, England, in 1862, and died in Grez-sur-Loing, France, in 1934. He did not come from a musical family; rather, his father owned a wool company and hoped that his son would follow a career in business. Delius, however, wanted to study music, and though his father did not approve of music Read more as a profession, he did not discourage music-making as a pastime; thus, Delius was allowed to study the violin and the piano. To his father's dismay, he also spent much of his youth sneaking away from school to attend concerts and opera performances.

When he completed school, he went to work for his father in the family business. In 1884, he left England for Florida, where he worked on a plantation as an orange grower. While in Florida, he began studying music with Thomas Ward, a musician and teacher from Jacksonville. Delius proved to be a failure as an orange grower, and began supporting himself as a musician. In 1886, his father arranged for him to spend a year and a half studying music in Germany at the Leipzig Conservatory. Though Delius would later insist that he learned very little of importance during his stay in Leipzig, it was there that he met Grieg, with whom he forged a lifelong friendship. Grieg convinced Delius' father to allow the young man to become a composer, and Delius, with the support of his formerly reluctant father, soon moved to Paris and began living the life of an artist. Once in Paris, Delius began composing in earnest, and towards the end of the nineteenth century had already completed two operas, Irmelin and The Magic Fountain.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Delius married the painter Jelka Rosen and produced a number of important works, including the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, the large-scale choral works Appalachia and A Mass of Life (based on the writings of Nietzsche), a piano concerto, and a number of songs and chamber pieces. His music was well-received throughout Europe, and Delius was quite successful up until World War I, when he was forced to leave France for England. Despite his renown in continental Europe, Delius was virtually unknown in his native England, and his stay there was marred by financial difficulties. After the war, Delius returned to France, where the syphilis he had contracted in Florida gradually caused him to become paralyzed and blind. Ironically, as Delius became increasingly infirm, his fame began to spread. This was due in large part to the efforts of English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, who championed Delius' music and organized a Delius Festival in 1929.

Though terribly ill, Delius nonetheless still wanted to compose, and in 1928 enlisted the services of English musician Eric Fenby, to whom he dictated music (Fenby would later write a book about Delius). Towards the end of his life, Delius was made Companion of Honor by King George V of England, and was awarded an honorary degree in music by Oxford University. Before his death, Delius was able to hear his music over the radio and on record, but these accomplishments paled before the terrible deterioration of his health, and he died in seclusion. Read less Featured Frederick Delius CDs & DVDs:

Question: Who wrote the opera's A Village Romeo and Juliet and The Magic Fountain?
Answer: Frederick Delius